The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Many new cars will be installed with some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services. These services may be accessed through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics units in mobile vehicles establish a communication channel between an in-vehicle mobile phone and a receiver phone responsive to a user speaking a nametag to identify the phone number of the receiver phone. A user programs the nametags and the related phone numbers into the telematics unit from inside the vehicle. A user can also program the nametags and the related phone numbers into the in-vehicle mobile phone or a personal mobile phone.
The telematics unit and the mobile phone include an automated speech recognition (ASR) engine to correlate the spoken nametag with a plurality of phoneme sets for a given language. The telematics unit and the mobile phone can include a plurality of ASR engines to correlate the spoken nametag with phoneme sets for a respective plurality of languages. In this embodiment, the user indicates which ASR engine to use for the language that the user is speaking. The user also programs each ASR engine for a given language with the nametags for that language.
When a user buys a new vehicle with an embedded telematics unit the user generally wants to have some or all of the nametags from the initial vehicle in the new vehicle. Currently, the user must be in the new vehicle to input the list of nametags from the previous vehicle into the new vehicle for recognition by the ASR engine. Likewise, if a user buys a new vehicle with a telematics unit and wants to have the nametags from a mobile phone in the new vehicle, the user must be in the new vehicle to input the list of nametags from the mobile phone into the new vehicle for recognition by the ASR engine. If the user wants access to several languages, then the user must be in the new vehicle to reprogram the ASR engine for each language in the new vehicle with the list of nametags in the previous vehicle or the mobile phone.
It is desirable to transfer the nametags in all language from the initial vehicle or the mobile phone to the new vehicle without requiring the user to be in the new vehicle and without requiring the user needing to recall all the nametags in the initial vehicle or mobile phone.